It’s been an exciting week at Consensio, as we ran an event with Ogilvy at the London HR Connection, called ‘Conflict Management with the Mad Men’ on Tuesday. Ross Bartlett, Head of Learning & Development at Ogilvy, one of the world’s largest international advertising agencies, spoke about his innovative management development programme, which is accredited by the Chartered Institute of Management. The programme includes a module delivered by Consensio on Conflict Management Skills for Managers, and we have already trained over 75 Ogilvy managers.
Ross talked about Ogilvy’s commitment to train and develop its managers to enable them to have difficult conversations at work so that conflict situations that usually take up so much time are dealt with quickly and effectively. The result has been that Ogilvy managers are now able to focus on the creative, enjoyable and productive aspects of their work.
We played an excerpt from the TV series ‘Mad Men’, to see how workplace conflict has (and in some cases hasn’t!) changed in the last 50 years. It was interesting to hear about the experiences of other senior HR professionals at the event, who felt that a lot of their managers shied away from difficult conversations, because they lacked the confidence to deal with issues.
As always, we emphasised the importance of empowering managers to have the right people management skills to succeed in their roles. Workplace mediation skills and conflict management techniques help managers to identify the early warning signs of conflict and gives managers a framework with which to have difficult workplace conversations. The Mad Men series might have been quite different if they had all been through some conflict resolution training!
